Find out where we make food happen!

We strive to get our clients as close to the end product as possible, as early in the process as possible. See where we create hundreds of food concepts and protocepts on a daily basis and how we enable our clients to bring commercially viable products to market.

Concept Creation

Regardless of how we fill the pipeline for you, we apply holistic thinking, decades of cross-category experience, and an innate understanding of consumer food behavior and food trends to transform your ideas into viable business concepts.

ProtoThink is a mobile co-creation platform. Using social media as a tool, we ideate, track, and document new concepts, flavors, ingredients, forms, restaurants, cooking methods, and shopping and eating behaviors – in real-time, accessible to the team in the cloud.

Our creative team of food inventors moderate the sessions to stimulate thinking in order to identify the most disruptive, yet feasible concepts that match your needs. We then turn the output from ProtoThink into new-to-you concepts as well as new-to-the-world innovations.

The Food Studio is a collaborative, food-centric ideation session where we create real product models for expressing ideas. Being able to visualize concepts beyond words on paper results in a more successful ideation. We unleash creativity with real food you can see, touch, and (sometimes) eat. The result is dozens of concepts created in a single session. Consumers can’t eat concepts, and management doesn’t eat strategy. This team-building environment fosters buy-in from all disciplines– innovation, marketing, operations and executives.

When you need a fresh perspective from outside your company’s four-walls, leverage our innovation team’s 150-plus years of combined experience to identify food opportunities where none seem to exist.

You set the criteria; we ideate within these parameters. Then, using our food-centric approach, we deliver concepts as a holistic, strategic blueprint. This outlines the elements required to get you to market: from positioning to culinary strategy, from food processing technology to manufacturing, and from placement to channel strategy.

Inspiration for Concept + Product Development

Every team needs inspiration beyond your four walls. As part of the innovation process, we offer a range of engagements to spur creativity, foster cross-team collaboration and provide fodder for your next product line, menu concept, food form or ingredient.

INTEGRATED CONSUMER INSIGHTS

Uncover insights from the only truly integrated end-to-end innovation firm in the Food & Beverage industry.

We integrate research seamlessly into the development plan in a way a third party vendor cannot. You can rest assured that the research is being conducted with actionable results in mind. That’s the way we’re wired, because we’re usually tasked with executing upon those results.

BRANDING AND DESIGN

We are specialists in creating new brands and designing impactful trial-driving packaging. We use our food innovation expertise to create memorable names, identities, and product communication in all categories, channels, and consumer need states.

Product Design and Development

A great product is your ultimate competitive advantage. We develop products for every category, consumer need state, technology, temperature state, culinary tradition, and channel of distribution. Our teams of product developers include multidisciplinary expertise that are as broad as they are deep and include culinary cross-trained food technologists, technology cross-trained chefs, regulatory experts and commercialization specialists.

WE OFFER

• Product Design

• Product Research and Development

• Ingredient Applications

• Manufacturing Process Development

Commercialization

With our cross-functional food lab teams, dedicated commercialization specialists, and two on-site pilot plants, we are able to meet your commercialization needs. From identifying qualified co-packers to leading plant trials, from managing full-size production runs to conducting shelf-life testing, our team is experienced across virtually every technology to ensure your product is commercially viable and market-ready.